March 28, 2018

How to Run a Complete Social Analysis Step-By-Step

You're killing it on Twitter—every tweet is better than the next—but is your social media success driving your sales? If your answer is "I don't know," or "I think so," it's time to run a social analysis. While it's nice to be able to showcase your social media reach and retweet records, they might not be generating as many sales or visitors as you think. In this article, you'll get a step-by-step walkthrough on how to locate issues, find the data you need, perform competitor comparisons and learn how to get started creating the content you need to convert visitors to clients.

Locating the Issue

The first step in performing a social analysis for your business is determining which questions you should ask. These questions should lead you closer to achieving your specific goal, whatever that may be.

Do you want higher sales? More traffic? Are people leaving your page too soon? Here are some good examples of specific questions that will lead you towards finding solutions.

How much traffic to my website are my Facebook efforts driving?

Which blog post had the most success on Twitter?

Are Instagram visitors sticking around for my content?

How many sales are coming from my LinkedIn ads?

Finding the Right Data

For this blog, we'll use the Google Merchandise Store as an example and try to figure out which social media platform is driving the most traffic to a specific page using Google Analytics.

Seeing that "/store.html," performed well in the last week, let’s look at which platform contributed the most to its success.

To do this, we'll need to add a secondary dimension.

Select "/store.html," and in the secondary dimension drop-down, click on "Acquisition" then click "Source" to determine where visitors are coming from.

Now we're able to see that Youtube has driven nearly 442.86% more visitors than the next highest social platform, Facebook.

You may need to increase the number of rows from 10 in order to see all social media sources.

This probably means that Google isn't committing much effort towards Facebook for the Google Merchandise Store. If it is one of their focuses, however, it might be time for them to run their own social analysis.

This is also a good time to determine if your content is reaching your intended audiences.

To do that, select any of the secondary dimensions under "Users" that you'd like to know such as age, gender, language and device.

Comparing Competitor Data

Now that you know the numbers, I bet you're wondering how well your business is doing compared to others.

Using Analytics’ "Benchmarking" feature, you can compare your data against thousands of other anonymous companies in your industry.

Benchmarking can also be found in the sidebar under "Audience." Select it and click on "Channels" to view average performance of all channels across specific industries.

You'll need to select which industry you want to compare against in the top left, such as shopping, entertainment or business. You'll also need to set a scope of daily sessions in order for Analytics to generate the data.

Here, we can see the Google Merchandise Store is doing well against competitors in the shopping industry and achieves 25% more social traffic than average.

Benchmarking is also a fantastic way to pinpoint areas of acquisition that need improvement, such as email and paid search.

Comparing Against Specific Competitors

Simply plug in a competitor domain after clicking on "Traffic Analytics" in the sidebar. We'll look at the Microsoft Merchant store.

The chart above shows that the Microsoft Merchandise store averages around 2,000 users from social media a month and had a huge spike in September 2017. Note that this data is an estimate and that SEMrush does require a subscription to use.

Being able to gauge the success of your competitors’ efforts can be a huge advantage and give you an idea of what content is working with your target audience.

Google might be able to look back at what types of content Microsoft was posting in September and attempt to replicate its success.

Creating Data Driven Content

Once you've got an idea of which content your audience reacts to, there are several programs to help you create quality, professional-looking content.

If you're finding that your audience prefers images, Canva is an image editing software that allows you to add text, resize and add graphics to images. Most of the editing features are free to the public and Canva also offers a large database of high quality photographs for a premium. Canva even allows you to create one of the highest performing types of content— Infographics.

If your competitors are producing video content but you lack the editing skills or software, Promo is an incredibly simple way to add custom text over videos. Like Canva, it offers millions of videos which you can easily customize with your message and logo.

Whichever type of content you decide to go with, make sure it's been proven to resonate with your audience through either your (or your competitor's) efforts. Performing a social analysis is the first step towards achieving your social media goals. Once you're made aware of the actual results of your efforts, you are much more capable of making effective decisions.

Whether it's focusing your efforts to improve a low-performing platform or eliminating it altogether, knowing the facts is the first step in the right direction.

Want an even more in-depth social analysis? Contact us below to get a free consultation!